Lead AI Engineer

Rentokil Initial; Crawley; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Rentokil Initial's Group AI Team is scaling to deliver production-grade AI solutions across our global operations. We are establishing an Agentic Factory to design, build, and deploy genAI & ML solutions, multi-agent workflows, and automation systems to solve complex business problems.

The role leads engineering within the Agentic Factory, bridging business requirements and technical execution, mentoring AI engineers and data scientists, and ensuring scalable, enterprise-grade AI platforms and

Qualifications

• Experience in leading engineering teams for AI projects.
• Ability to design scalable, production-grade AI platforms.
• Strong background in genAI, ML, and agentic architectures.
• Proven track record with CI/CD for ML/AI pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering efforts within the Agentic Factory.
• Mentor AI engineers and data scientists.
• Define best practices, architectures, and guardrails for AI systems.
• Collaborate with data platform teams for data ingestion and modeling.
• Deliver production-grade AI solutions and scale globally.

Skills

AI architecture

MLOps

CI/CD pipelines

GCP

Vertex AI

Mentoring

Multi-agent systems

RAG architecture

Tools

GCP

Vertex AI

Job description

As part of our Group AI Team, we are scaling our internal capabilities to deliver cutting-edge, production-grade AI solutions across our global operations.

We are establishing an "Agentic Factory" - a dedicated, high-velocity delivery team focused on designing, building, and deploying genAI & ML solutions, multi-agent workflows, and automation systems to solve complex business problems.

The primary goals of the team include:

• Leading the technical design and architecture of AI solutions, in addition to building and running an AI platform to deliver business-specific Use Case solutions.
• Collaborating with the Data Platform to team in ingesting and transforming data from multiple systems, modeling data, and engineering data marts to create reusable data assets, including developing and implementing machine learning models, genAI, and Agentic AI.
• Creating an operating a company wide agentic AI solution platform to help scale up AI capabilities across all functions and regions.
• Building AI models and a data science platform that enables Rentokil to derive significant value from AI, from machine learning to gen AI and beyond, and ensuring the quality and reliability of AI solutions deployed on the platform.
• Support, govern and enable company-wide adoption of emerging AI technologies.

Purpose of the role

We are seeking a pragmatic, highly technical individual to lead the engineering efforts within our Agentic Factory.

Sitting directly alongside our AI & Delivery Manager and AI Product Owner, you will bridge the gap between business requirements and technical execution. Together with the AI & Data Architect, you will provide architectural oversight, defining engineering best practices, and mentoring a talented team of AI engineers & Data Scientists, while remaining hands‑on enough to solve complex engineering bottlenecks; You will support Use Case Design and feasibility assessments, ensuring opportunities explored are achievable and scalable.

You will support the Head of Engineering as the execution arm for AI responsibilities, extending your focus beyond the AI team to support and enable other IT teams across the organisation.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Engineering

• Design Agentic Systems: Design and scale robust, secure, and production-ready multi-agent workflows, orchestrations, and advanced RAG architectures, in collaboration with Enterprise Architecture principles. Drive delivery by designing and building agentic solutions, spanning from piloting to full implementation
• Define Engineering Excellence: Establish strict coding standards, code review processes, testing frameworks, and evaluation metrics for generative AI applications. Support and strictly enforce the standards set by the Head of Engineering and Technical Architect
• Cloud & Platform Integration: Partner closely with our GCP and Data Engineering teams to build seamless LLMOps/MLOps CI/CD pipelines, ensuring scalable and cost-effective model deployment via Vertex AI and containerized environments. Take ownership of building and maintaining robust LLMOps pipelines.
• AI Safety & Guardrails: Implement robust evaluation frameworks, latency monitoring, and automated guardrails to ensure enterprise-grade safety, security, and compliance.
• AI Safety & Guardrails: Implement robust evaluation frameworks, latency monitoring, and automated guardrails to ensure enterprise-grade safety, security, and compliance.
• Internal AI Enablement & Prompt Lifecycle: Manage the engineering workflows, CI/CD pipelines, version control, and evaluation frameworks for internal developer-facing AI assets, including prompt libraries and automated testing agents.

Team Mentorship & Delivery

• Grow the team: Act as a technical mentor to a team of intermediate and junior AI Engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, clean code, and agility.
• Pragmatic Delivery: Collaborate with the AI Product Owner and Business Analysts to translate abstract business use cases into structured, achievable technical sprints.
• Drive MVP to Production: Shift the team’s focus from sandboxed proof-of-concepts (PoCs) to reliable, resilient applications deployed to production for global users, leading AI engineering for AI team solutions and actively supporting junior engineers through this transition.

Evolve AI Maturity

• Support the company’s evolving AI strategy, providing an expert voice on Use Case identification, platform identification and tool selection.
• Advise the AI portfolio Lead in scaling impact and AI capability